light dawns on Marblehead.

I've been watching Agatha Christie's Poirot from the beginning, since Netflix only had series 9-13, and a while ago, and I flamed out trying to watch the final episode, which is very sad and bitter. It's amazing how thoroughly Arthur Conan Doyle defined the modern detective genre: at least in English, any venture into detective fiction is either avoiding or nodding to Sherlock Holmes. So it is with Hercule Poirot: finicky, unpredictable, brilliant, prideful. But Poirot was a policeman, and respects policemen, where Holmes more often than not can scarcely cloak his contempt in politeness. Poirot freely loves and cares about people, with some spiritual foundation, alluded to as Catholicism; Holmes cares, but is never able to articulate why, and his conduct in personal relationships rivals the most awkward teenage boy trying to talk to girls at a dance.

(No that wasn't me SHUT UP)

Series 3 begins with a flashback double episode, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," which takes place during World War 1, and shows Poirot leading a group of fellow Belgian refugees around town.

...I didn't know there were Belgian refugees in World War 1. As I thought about it, I realized I had no idea what Belgium's experience of World War 1 was, why it should have been that way, or in fact much detail about World War 1 at all. (I mean, I read at least some of "In Flanders Fields" in school, so I knew there was at least one battle in Flanders, but we don't call it "World War 1" because it was highly localized.)

This odd-looking gap in my knowledge arises from having studied history in a thematic sort of way. I can tell you about the technological, economic, artistic, and geopolitical consequences of the war, and a decent amount of what went into it, but by definition, that airbrushes the details so you can see the broad strokes of color. I'm not great at memorizing pages and pages of raw information--ask me how much fun I had the final time I was an actor, or why I stopped after a single semester of Chinese--so I took advantage of a liberal arts education's offer to focus on concepts and patterns rather than memorizing.

The problem is that human events sometimes just don't quite make sense without some missing keystone fact. Part of the Middle East gestalt remained out of focus until I happened to hear author Stephen Kinzer on NPR, talking about how the CIA ousted the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953.

I didn't know Iran had a democracy! Suddenly it made sense why the Shah was hated enough that his overthrow could rebound so hard and consistently derive so much energy from anti-American sentiment. Not that they didn't have problems at the time, but they were working on solving them their way, and we broke their country because British Petroleum wanted us to.

Returning to Belgium, I went searching and found Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which covers a manageable lead-up to and first 30 days of the war. Her writing is spectacular! And...wow. What a mess. I've barely started and already found a keystone fact I'd been missing: the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War--I didn't remember anything about it except that it had happened--was France:

• being baited into declaring war on the confederation steadily becoming Germany;
• losing; and
• forced to surrender under thoroughly humiliating terms,
• designed to cripple for generations their ability to make war,
• adjusting their borders so they could only be on defense,
• signed at...Versailles!

Oh, damn. Dear readers, Shit Has Gotten Real, because after the 1871 Armistice of Versailles, France paid off its indemnity early, and immediately re-set itself to only think of offense. All this time, I'd thought the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had been ordinary human vengeance, and it certainly was, but not (or not only) for the Great War.

What a fucking mess.